Andrew Sorrell Running For House of Representatives, Alabama, District 3

Andrew Sorrell

Andrew Sorrell is a 32-year-old entrepreneur, private pilot, advanced SCUBA diver, Eagle Scout, and well-known local anti-tax activist…NOT a politician. Andrew is seeking to be the first Republican elected to State House, District 3 since Reconstruction.

Andrew grew up in Muscle Shoals and attended Webster Elementary School, McBride Middle School, and Muscle Shoals High School, and graduated in 2004. By testing out of many credit hours, taking overloads, and enrolling in summer semesters, Andrew completed his 4-year Business Management degree at the University of North Alabama (UNA) in less than 2 years, finishing in July 2006.

Ethics and Corruption

Recently, we have seen both the Governor and the Speaker of the House removed from office because of corruption. I believe we need a serious housecleaning in Montgomery; it is time to drain the swamp! I believe elected officials should be held to a high standard.

I have done my part to support ethics and fight against corruption as a member of the Republican Steering Committee. I supported a resolution calling on Governor Bentley to resign, and supported a code of ethics for the Steering Committee itself.

The good news is, the tough ethics laws the Republicans passed in 2010 are working. In fact, they are working so well that the laws are holding officials in the Republican Party accountable. Ethics is not a partisan issue. We all agree that it is imperative that we be able to trust our elected officials.

I do not support weakening the ethics laws. (I would work to revise the text of the laws for clarity’s sake.) Alabama needs to make greater strides to clean up corruption in Montgomery.

2nd Amendment gun rights

I am a firm believer in gun rights. I am a lifetime member of the NRA (National Rifle Association) and the NAGR (National Association for Gun Rights). I am also a member of Bama Carry. I own Gold, Guns, and Guitars, Inc., which sells thousands of firearms each year. I am against any law (or proposed bill) that restricts the ownership of guns for law-abiding citizens, or infringes in any way on our right to bear arms.

Religious Liberty

Religious liberty was one of the founding principles of our American Republic. Alabama needs to protect the individual liberties and freedoms that made our country great.

I do not believe it is right to force pro-life individuals or organizations to fund abortion through their tax dollars or health insurance premiums. I do not believe individuals should have to set aside their deeply held religious beliefs to hold elected office or operate a small business.

In Alabama, about 30% of adoptions are through faith-based organizations. I supported legislation that allows faith-based adoption agencies to screen potential parents for adoptions based on the organization’s sincerely held religious beliefs.

Growth of Government

I am a small-government conservative and I believe most political issues should be decided at the local level rather than mandated by the state. Every time a new agency is created or a new regulation is passed, we lose a bit of our freedom. As your representative, I will be careful to limit the size of government so that we remain as free as possible. I believe our State Government should focus its attention on these objectives:

- Funding education

- Maintaining and improving our infrastructure

- Ensuring a level playing field for all businesses

- Enforcing contracts through the court system

- Protecting the public through law enforcement

I will seek to combine overlapping agencies and eliminate job-killing regulations that require hiring more state employees to enforce.

Christian Values

My father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all Baptist preachers. Therefore, I was raised in a conservative home with traditional Christian values. I am 100% pro-life, 100% against gay marriage, and believe that parents should have the final say over how they raise their children and what they are taught in school.

I will always vote to support Christian cultural values that have served America so well. I was recently married to my wife Hannah, and we look forward to starting a family together here in the Shoals Area where conservative family values are part of the culture.

I also support a Constitutional Amendment declaring that Alabama is a pro-life state.

Infrastructure & Economic Development

I have a bold plan for District 3 infrastructure and economic development. These ideas will put Shoals residents back to work, attract businesses, and improve safety and quality of life for the citizens. My ideas include:

Build overpasses for traffic at the railroad tracks on Avalon Avenue and Montgomery Avenue. Ground level crossings for railroad tracks are a huge safety concern in our district for both the railroad company and the citizens. Thousands of labor hours are wasted in our district each day as citizens patiently wait for trains to roll by. Students and faculty at Northwest-Shoals Community College all regularly get stuck waiting on the train to cross the road. For around $20 million each, we could eliminate these ground level crossings by building overpasses that would also increase traffic flow and quality of life. This has been a problem for decades and it is time to fix the problem.

Turn the Colbert Steam Plant industrial site into a useable site for automobile manufacturing (or another similar use.) This location has access to major highways and the Tennessee River, and several automobile manufacturers are already rumored to be looking at using the property for this purpose.

Establish a port authority at the Colbert Steam plant location. This site can hold 70 barges at once, which creates a huge opportunity for our local farmers. Currently, the Co-ops are spending around 30 cents per bushel to truck grain to Memphis so it can be loaded onto barges headed to the Midwest. I believe that if we have the capability to ship the grain out on barges ourselves, our local famers could improve their razor-thin profit margins.

Develop the old International Paper site into a useable industrial site. Recruit a company to repurpose this location and bring manufacturing jobs back to the Shoals.

I want to keep our tax dollars at home so they work for us. Right now, the major infrastructure projects are going to Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile. I will make sure that District 3 will get its fair share of infrastructure projects.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

Every politician in Alabama promises to create jobs in their district; however, few of them actually know how. Even fewer have ever actually created a job themselves or started a small business. I am 32 years old, and have started multiple small businesses and created 40 Alabama jobs. I have seen first-hand how government regulations, fees, and red tape stunt business growth and discourage entrepreneurship.

As your representative in Montgomery, I will sponsor a bill to eliminate the Business Personal Property tax and Business Privilege tax. These two job-killers are paperwork nightmares and one goes so far as to charge tax annually on all business assets. That includes desks, chairs, lamps, coffee pots, trashcans, staplers, Christmas decorations, toilet paper, etc. It’s just nuts!

Taxation

I have fought several ballot referendums that sought to raise taxes on hard-working Alabama residents. One of these tax increases was on the ballot in Colbert County. In 2013 Colbert had raised property taxes by 3 mills. By the spring of 2015 the Colbert County School Board was again seeking higher taxes. I led a group of grassroots activists who defeated this “Farm Tax” by a shocking 87% to 13% margin. (Over the next 2 years, the reserves of the Colbert County School Board went from $3 million to $6 million, proving the proposed tax increase had been completely unnecessary.)

As your representative, I will do my best to keep from raising taxes. I will seek instead to creatively fund necessary programs, eliminate government waste, and collect millions of dollars of taxes that slip through the cracks by those who cheat the system. I also am totally opposed to an Internet sales tax because it taxes a segment of our economy that is continuing to experience high growth and is creating new jobs.

Economic Development

I believe government has an important role to play in economic development. It is the government’s responsibility to create a business-friendly environment by keeping taxes low, regulations few, and playing fields level. Beyond these three things, government’s role should be merely recruiting businesses based on the availability of natural resources, convenience to population centers, and ensuring local infrastructure meets the needs of private enterprise.

I oppose expanding existing social welfare programs, and do not support corporate welfare programs.

I will promote organic economic growth through small business formation. I support entrepreneurship and free enterprise, which will bring us the jobs that we need into this district. I will also promote these two education ideas which will directly impact the future of our local economy:

1 – Teach entrepreneurship classes beginning in high school. Children today are programmed to look for jobs rather than looking for opportunities.

2 – Allow students to explore multiple interests rather than pressuring them to choose a career track at a young age.

Budgeting

Alabama is required by law to have a balanced budget. We have a surplus in the education fund budget and a deficit in the general fund budget. Additionally, all of the growth tax revenues (sales and property taxes) are in the education budget. We need to do what any common-sense family budgeter would do: combine the two budgets. This would allow us to shift money so that we could balance both budgets. There are fewer than 5 states in America that still have separate budgets for education and the general fund.

We also need to end the practice of earmarking our budgets. Almost 90% of our state budget is earmarked, making it difficult (and often impossible) for the legislators to identify and eliminate overlap and waste.

Medicaid Expansion

The Medicaid expansion was part of Barack Obama’s healthcare plan called “Obamacare.” It loosened the income requirements to qualify to receive benefits if states opted into the new system. It provided 100% funding for the first few years, but only 90% funding after that. This left a state like Alabama picking up an additional $250 million tab on an already strained general fund budget.

I am opposed to the expansion of Medicaid. My plan for Medicaid includes the following components:

Cut the waste, fraud, and abuse in the system. Right now, some people are taking advantage of the $0 copays and visiting the emergency room 100 times per year. Others call an ambulance simply to get a free ride to the hospital. Alabama can no longer afford to waste money on things such as these.
Petition the federal government for a Medicaid block grant. Getting all our money in one chunk would allow us the opportunity to distribute it in a more efficient manner than we currently are able to do. Presently, Alabama has no control over how Medicaid dollars are spent.
Revitalize our economy so more people have their own health insurance policy. As we lower our unemployment numbers and the Alabama economy recovers, we will be paying for fewer and fewer people to be on Medicaid.

Retirement and RSA

Retirees should get every penny of the retirement money that they were promised by the state. I will oppose any effort to reduce the payout from RSA to senior citizens. We need to continue funding RSA to keep it sound and fulfill our promises to those who contributed faithfully for many years.

Education

I am related to several educators who have informed my opinions on education. My wife comes from a family of teachers, and has taught at both the college and the middle school level. She taught special education at Hidden Treasure Christian School, and she can attest that smaller classroom sizes and individual planning and instruction makes a world of difference in education. Likewise, my mother has spent years educating the next generation. She has taught nursing for 21 years at UNA and Northwest-Shoals Community College.

I believe that a public education option is foundational to preserving our republican form of government. We all benefit from a strong education curriculum and strong schools.

I fully support the right of parents to homeschool or send their children to private schools when they do not feel their children are getting a good education in the public school system and/or when the school system’s moral philosophy is contradictory to a family’s values.

I believe in school choice. Parents should be able to move their children from failing schools to a school where their child has a better chance at a good education and success in life. Forcing students to stay in failing schools is a disservice to the community. Children should have the opportunity to get the best education available within their geographic region.

I support the repeal of Common Core education standards, because I believe it promotes some objectionable material and because education has failed to improve under that system. The Department of Education has basically forced states to accept the standards by tying grant money to the standards. I believe curriculum should be customized at the local level to meet the needs of each school district.

We have to stop simply teaching the standardized tests to improve the scores. Teachers are pressured to get results, and we must stop asking kids to conform to a standardized test. Not all students learn the same way, and not all students are good test takers.

After 15 years in the education system, I realized when I graduated college that I had never been taught basic entrepreneurial skills. All education seems to be directed at preparing students to get a job when they graduate high school or college. The problem is, often times they struggle to find a job because the jobs don’t exist. We need more classes geared towards starting small businesses. About 2/3rds of the new jobs created come from small business.

We need to focus on technical training programs in developing career fields so graduating students can easily find a job.

We need to expand the AP (Advanced Placement) program, which allows high school students to take college-level classes and earn dual credit.

I will also work to ensure more tax dollars actually reach the classroom instead of administration and bureaucracy.

Prisons

Alabama has 180% capacity in its prison system. If we don’t take action soon, a federal court may step in and force us to begin releasing prisoners. Already, prisoners are released back into the population after serving only a small portion of their sentence. Unfortunately, Alabama is on a tight budget and does not have the nearly one billion dollars it would take to build four new prisons. I do not support building new prisons, but I do have some creative ideas to solve our prison problem.

1 – Fund mental health. Many of the prisoners we have today might not have committed a crime at all if their mental conditions had been treated a year ago. I will allocate additional budget dollars to the Alabama Department of Mental Health.

2 – Support laws to shorten appeal times, similar to the one that passed in the 2017 Legislative Session. I do not support reducing the number of appeals available to inmates on death row, because everyone deserves every chance to prove their innocence. However, there is no reason an appeal should take 5-10 years.

3 – Teach prisoners a trade. When prisoners are released, those who have a marketable skill are likely to use it. I support trade programs for non-violent offenders so they can reestablish themselves once they have repaid their debt to society. I also think prisoners should be offered a factory-type job while in prison so they can pay for part of their expenses and save some money for when they leave the system. That way they walk out the door with some money and are less likely to commit a crime as they search for employment.

4 – Allow felonies to drop off a person’s record. For non-violent offenders, I support removing the felony from their record after some period of time. If a 19-year-old is caught smoking marijuana, he or she will live with a felony on their record for the rest of his or her life, making honest employment difficult to obtain. It would be to our benefit to allow these rehabilitated people to re-enter the workforce and become productive citizens. I believe this would lower the recidivism rate.

5 – Open more drug courts. We have reduced our prison population from 27,000 to 24,000 due in large part to drug courts. We can potentially drop to as low as 20,000 by using this idea.

6 – Rent beds from county jails. For instance, Limestone County has a 230-bed jail but only 115 inmates. The state should contract with these jails and immediately shift prisoners to them. In fact, 1500 beds are being offered at $30/day by partially empty jails statewide. It costs Alabama $48/day per prisoner.

Agriculture

Farming feeds Alabama. Here are a few ways I will support local agriculture:

Make sure “roads to market” are accessible and useable.
Oppose regulations that add to crop production expenses.
Support tax credits for irrigation systems or other capital investment projects.
Fight excessive restrictions on water quality or irrigation run-off.
Oppose inspections on farm equipment traveling on public roads and agricultural load limits on those roads.
Support funding of invasive species research.
Property Rights (Eminent Domain)

I will defend private property rights. The U.S. Constitution establishes that property can only be taken for public use. As a result, these instances should be fairly rare. “Public use” does not mean that the government can seize it and sell it to a private corporation just so the government earns more tax revenue off of the property. Property can be taken to build roads or utility easements, but should never be seized so that a private corporation can build a new shopping mall or for any other business-related activity.

Tort Reform

For businesses in Alabama to thrive, they have to be protected from frivolous lawsuits. While I support a fair and just court system that reimburses citizens for expenses due to negligence of others, we need to prevent frivolous lawsuits that bog down our court system and cost the state thousands as we adjudicate the suit.

Additionally, we need to pass statutory maximum damage limits for medical malpractice lawsuits. Placing a cap on the amount of these awards will help to keep the cost of health insurance down.

Human Trafficking

The definition of human trafficking according to Dictionary.com is:

“The illegal practice of procuring or trading in human beings for the purpose of prostitution, forced labor, or other forms of exploitation.” It would be easy to assume this would never happen in your backyard, but I-20 is actually considered a trafficking superhighway. We must take steps to protect children, immigrants, and other vulnerable individuals.

Here are some concrete steps Alabama can take to join the international fight against human trafficking:

- Pass laws with stricter penalties for perpetrators.

- Provide medical and psychological care, appropriate shelter, and legal assistance to victims. Also, help victims re-establish themselves in the workforce.

- Provide training to state troopers and local law enforcement to help them spot victims of human trafficking on routine traffic stops, especially on our interstates.

- Run a public awareness campaign to inform average citizens what they can do to join in the fight against human trafficking.

I will work on behalf of the citizens of our district to end modern day slavery in Alabama.

Media Release/Andrew Sorrell for State House, District 3